Spamhaus is the name of a project of an international organization with the same name. It has its offices in London and Geneva and was founded in 1998 by British entrepreneur and spam counterpart Steve Linford. The aim of the project's activities is to detect, track (trace) and provide countermeasures for both e-mail spammers and spam-related activities. The pseudo-German term Spamhaus was invented by Linford as a general reference to Internet Service Providers or other companies that are themselves Spam spread or knowingly support the spread of spam.
The reasons for the Spamhaus project
Steve Linford was originally active in the music scene as a composer, active professional musician and concert producer. As computers were increasingly used in music production, he developed a growing interest in computer technology. He founded a software company that first developed conventional software and then focused on internet technology. This resulted in the company Ultradesign Internet with the server-based network UXN. When Linford discovered that his customers were constantly being harassed with junk email, he sought measures to fight against it. That was the birth of Spamhaus.
Current status and current project sponsorship
With the support of the largest and most important Internet networks, Spamhaus developed a blacklist database that is updated in real time. Used is the Database today by Internet service providers, as well as governments and military network operators, among others. The number of junk and malware emails whose sending has been blocked with the support of Spamhaus is now in the billions. These successes naturally generated backlash from the cybercrime community, whose players found their illegal activities severely disrupted. Steve Linford became a target for criminal gangs around the world and even received death threats, often sent to him by e-mail. However, the project continues undeterred and currently, according to estimates, three quarters of Internet network operators worldwide use Spamhaus technologies. In 2005, Linford moved from England to the Mediterranean and currently lives near Monaco. He is now the managing director of Spamhaus, an international organization formed by a group of several companies. Its headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. The field of activity of the group of companies is Internet security and communication filtering. The project is popular and popular. In 2003, Steve Linford was named one of the "Top 50 Agenda Setters" by Silicon Magazine, and in 2004 he received the "Internet Hero Award" from the British ISP Association ISPA. The New York Times featured an article about Steve Linford on the front page of its Business section in 2005. Since then, his expertise has been sought in hearings on spam and Internet security at various governments, the European Parliament, and the United Nations.
Details on the use of spam protection
The blacklist database of Spamhaus contains various Anti-Spam-Many Internet service providers and e-mail server operators access the lists to protect their users from spam. In 2006, 650 million e-mail users were protected in this way from billions of spam e-mails per day. These included the European Parliament, the White House in Washington, the US Army and Microsoft. Spamhaus makes DNS-based block lists available for this purpose, which are differentiated into block lists (DNSBL) and white lists (DNSWL). Low-volume mail server operators are granted free access to the lists. However, a high number of queries are made by commercial spam filter services and similar service companies. These users have to register for a feed of DNSBLs based on the rsync protocol, which is called datafeed service. Spamhaus publishes how its technology works in the document "Understanding DNSBL Filtering".
The spectrum of the lists at a glance
- The Spamhaus Block List (SBL) aims to collect the IP addresses of known spam sources of all kinds. The SBL is partly based on the ROKSO index of known spammers.
- The Exploits Block List (XBL) contains entries of illegal 3rd party exploits, open proxies, malware with integrated spam engines and infected PCs and servers.
- The Policy Block List (PBL) is similar to a dialup user list. It contains dynamic and static IP addresses from which no e-mails should be sent directly to third-party servers.
- The Domain Block List (DBL) is a combination of URI Block List and RHSBL. It is similar to a strongly extended SBL with additional usage options.
- The Botnet Controller List (BCL) contains IP addresses that Spamhaus believes belong to cyber criminals who use botnet structures host.
- The Spamhaus White List (SWL) lists IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and is intended to enable mail servers to separate incoming e-mail traffic into 3 categories: "Good", "Bad" and "Unknown".
- The Domain White List (DWL) enables an automatic certification of the listed domains with the DKIM signatures.
- Spamhaus also offers two combination lists. One of them combines the SBL and the XBL. The second is called ZEN and combines all IP address based lists.
Some accompanying features
The spam house "Register of Known Spam Operations" (ROKSO) is a database containing people, their domains, as well as addresses and aliases. Registered are spammers and spam operations that have been blocked by three or more ISPs due to spamming. The Don't Route Or Peer List (DROP) is a text file that shows CIDR blocks that have been stolen or otherwise completely controlled by spammers or spam processes.
